When Jennifer Aniston goes back to her roots, it has nothing to do with her famous hair. Like Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, Aniston headed abroad when her first marriage fell apart. As ex-husband Brad Pitt began to go public with his newfound love Angelina Jolie in 2005, Aniston decided to travel to Greece, her ancestral homeland (the actress's actual last name is Anastassakis). At the time, Aniston told U.K. media, "I'm going to take some time off, travel. I want to go to Greece and some other countries. I lived there for a year when I was five and six. We lived in Athens for six months, then we lived in Crete. It would be a refreshing thing to be out of this little bubble."
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In 2008, the actress road-tripped through Spain in a convertible with Mario Batali in search of the best Spanish food. “The first day, when we set off from Madrid, I ate a wicked tuna sandwich on a really crusty Spanish baguette; I totally messed up the car but was in heaven,” Paltrow said, a surprising change from her famously strict macrobiotic diet. The odd couple filmed their trek for the PBS in a series called Spain… On the Road Again.
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Have love? She'll travel. Cameron Diaz recently confessed a secret that jibes with her liberated, free-spirit persona. The actress takes to the skies to find her heart, she recently admitted to Playboy. "Oh gosh, I can't even count how many times I've gotten on a plane for love," she told the magazine. "It's not unusual in this business; my lifestyle demands it. I'm always traveling for [whispers] c--k. You've got to go where it is." Diaz also travels for fun and friendship, as evidenced by pictures of her chilling on far-flung beaches with erstwhile BFF Drew Barrymore, and surfing, too.
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After Drew Barrymore split with Strokes drummer Fabrizio Moretti in 2007, she went off the radar, straight to Hawaii, and took a pack of friends with her, including Cameron Diaz, who had just broken up with Justin Timberlake. The paparazzi did not allow the women to travel totally alone, however, and the two actresses were photographed smoking what appears to be a joint on a beach on Kauai. Barrymore has tried to rid herself of spectacle; she told Elle in this month's issue, "I've been so aggressive about living life to the fullest and being plugged into everything, but now I've ripped the plug out of the wall and put it on the floor for a while."
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In 1996, Sandy Pittman had been living the life of a New York City socialite and fashion editor at Allure and Conde Nast Traveler when she decided to leave the comfy confines of Manhattan for the rugged terrain of Mount Everest. After two unsuccessful attempts to summit the 29,000-foot mountain with a large group, she finally made it on the third. When Pittman finally got back down, she collapsed and was revived by a fellow female mountaineer's emergency steroid injection—a miracle, considering the fatal conditions had killed eight others on the mountain. Journalist Jonathan Krakauer covered the disastrous expeditions for Outside magazine and later turned it into the bestselling book, Into Thin Air.
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In 1926, Amelia Earhart was tapped by magazine publisher George Putnam to be the first woman ever to fly across the Atlantic—as a passenger—thus turning her into an instant celebrity. Putnam and Earhart later married and soon enough she was piloting planes solo, becoming the first person ever to fly from Hawaii to the mainland. In 1937, she attempted an around-the-world flight and disappeared on the last leg of the trip, never to be found again. Up in the sky, Earhart said, is when she felt truly alive. "The stars seemed near enough to touch and never before have I seen so many," she once said of a flight. "I always believed the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, but I was sure of it that night."
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In the early 1930s, the French writer Anais Nin left for a getaway to the calm, carefree city of Fez, Morocco. "I became aware that the little demon of depression which I had fought for twenty years, had ceased eating me," she wrote of the trip. "I was at peace. Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you." In a later diary, she would refer to Fez as a city of "Arabian Nights gentleness, tranquility, and mystery."
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The American writer Edith Wharton (whose 1905 novel, The House of Mirth, inspired the current television show Gossip Girl) didn't need the tranquil French countryside to find her sense of peace. Rather, it was the hustle and bustle of cities like Paris, Boulogne, and Clermont-Ferrand that got her emotional motor running. "The motor-car has restored the romance of travel," she wrote in A Motor Flight Through France in 1927. "Above all these recovered pleasures must be ranked the delight of taking a town unawares, stealing on it by back-ways and unchronicled paths, and surprising in it some intimate aspect of past time, some silhouette hidden for half a century or more by the ugly mask of railway embankments and the iron bulk of a huge station. Then the villages that we missed and yearned for from the windows of the train—the unseen villages have been given back to us!"
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Heiress Gertrude Bell, fluent in Arabic and Persian, spent nearly a decade prior to World War I crisscrossing the deserts of Iraq—and though she worked briefly in Cairo with T.E. Lawrence, her real legacy was creating a modern Iraq. Born into the sixth-richest family in England, she studied history at Oxford and was the first woman to travel alone in the Syrian desert. Impressive credentials, no doubt, but her success was a long time coming. From a young age, Bell wanted to get away from the hoity-toity culture at home. "I have had enough of these dinners where people say ‘I think' all the time," she wrote in a letter from London. And leave the U.K. she did. Bell departed for the Middle East and, along the way, had at least two love affairs (though, according to Georgina Howell's book Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations, she might have died a virgin).
Known as the first female sociologist, the British Victorian feminist Harriet Martineau set her sights on America. In 1834, Martineau embarked on a two-year trip through the U.S. She was an abolitionist when opposing slavery was an unpopular view held by few Americans, and Martineau eventually published a scathing critique of the country for its failure to live up to its ideals. The treatment of women also angered her—she titled one chapter, “The Political Non-existence of Women” and argued that "marriage need not be their only object in life."
